Topping Up

I spent a couple hours Thursday and Friday topping barrels. As wine ages in the barrels it slowly evaporates through the staves and heads of the barrel. This is part of the normal aging process and is what makes new wine evolve from brash fruit and fresh alcohol into a ‘finished’ wine.

I had quite a bit more loss than expected this month - I can only assume that it’s because the outside temperature has reached the high 90s and low 100s and the air conditioner is running 12 hours or more a day. It’s not a detriment to the wine at all, as long as I keep up with our topping regime. We know from errors made by others that not topping religiously can ruin great wine very fast.

We’ve got a great racking system now. We store our topping wine in stainless steel kegs and have a elaborate piece of stainless stell tubing and check valves to pull wine from the keg. An inert gas (argon in our case) is hooked up to the gas inlet valve, a hose with a pistol grip valve is hooked to the wine outlet. Argon goes in, wine comes out. The keg can be left with a pressuried argon atmosphere for weeks without harming the wine in the partially full container. Very easy to top barrels.

To cut down on topping losses we would ideally refrigerate the winery rather than use air conditioning, but we can’t afford refrigeration! Refrigeration would have cost us about $40K for our space vs. the $10K the AC cost to install. AC dries the air, and increases the evaporation rate of the wine in the barrels. Life is full of little trade-offs.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under Winemaking, Day To Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.